Ale Industries debuts new production brewery in Oakland

This week, Morgan Cox and Stephen Lopas successfully fired up the biodiesel boiler for their new production brewery, just the second in Oakland’s history since Prohibition (Linden Street was the first).

It’s the culmination of a lifelong dream for these two friends, whose Ale Industries has experienced rapid growth since launching in 2009 in the back warehouse of a Concord home brewing supply store.

Ale Industries’ new 6,000-square-foot space is located in a former tin manufacturing warehouse in Oakland’s Jingletown district, next to the Fruitvale BART station (the brewery’s nickname: Fruitvale Fermentation Factory). It will allow them to immediately double output to 5,000 barrels a year, with the potential for as much as 20,000. But they aren’t looking for world domination just yet, as they plan to slowly ramp up production and limit distribution mostly to northern California and Oregon. They’re perhaps most excited about the opportunity the new facility presents to expand their “Barrels and Uniquities division,” comprised of limited edition sours and barrel-aged beers.

“We’re not chasing that 90’s dream of high volume, low price,” Cox says.

As avid home brewers who sold nearly everything they owned to open their own brewery, the duo’s scrappy DIY ethos is very much in evidence. They moved all the equipment by themselves, piece by piece, over several months. And as for that biofuel boiler—as far as they know, they’re the only brewery to operate one in the Bay Area and possibly in the entire state—Cox assembled that himself as well. They take pride in running, minus electricity, a carbon-neutral operation, using electric forklifts and distributing their beer via a biodiesel truck.

Cox is hopeful that their new brewery can be another force for positive change in Oakland’s artsy, up-and-coming Jingletown/Fruitvale district. They plan to open a taproom, the Jingletown Jazz Room, within the next few months complete with live jazz on Fridays and Saturdays and a 63-foot bar looking out over the production facilities. And while it isn’t exactly mentioned in the same breath as some of Oakland’s higher-profile revitalized areas—Cox admits the location was a fallback option after getting priced out of Jack London Square—Cox sees huge potential for the neighborhood.

“It’s not within the hip areas that people know of in Oakland yet, but I think it’s going to be,” he says. “There’s already been stuff written about it, especially on the art scene, and I think in the next five years people will start discovering it.”

It also doesn’t hurt, Cox points out, that the brewery is less than a mile from the southern edge of affluent Alameda, whose residents frequently use the Fruitvale BART station as a nearby commuter hub.

“If I sit up on the roof, I can see 1,000 residential properties that are way out of my price range,” he says. “How hard is it going to be to convince people as they’re going down Fruitvale to turn right, go about 500 feet, get a growler filled up, and then go home?”